by Simona Musco
After using Bibbiano as a cudgel, anyone who asked for an account stopped even caring. “Tell us about Bibbiano”, everyone shouted in those terrible days. And now no one talks about it anymore…
It’s June 27, 2019. Val d’Enza ends up at the center of a nightmare, in a story so bad that it doesn’t seem true. It can’t be true. Because inside there are all the right ingredients to give life to a horror film: drawings of falsified children, loving fathers and mothers painted as monsters, scenes of simulated violence with disguises, gifts and letters of affection kept hidden. A real manipulation of children aged 6 to 11, with a single terrible objective: to take dozens of children away from their parents and pass them as parcels to foster families, possibly homosexuals, to earn money in paid private care and training courses.
Bibbiano, also the Local Health Authority at the meetings of the La Cura centre
A gruesome picture, in which angels transform into demons, just as the name of the investigation says. In that label – “Angels and Demons” – the sentence is already written: on one side there are the good ones, the parents, on the other the bad ones, social workers and psychotherapists. The Reggio Emilia prosecutor’s office is convinced: the children would have undergone a real brainwashing, made up of hours and hours of psychotherapy and suggestions induced through electrical impulses, through what was presented to the children as a “memory machine”, a system that would have “altered the state of memory in the vicinity of judicial interviews”.
The headlines on the front page the next day are horrifying. And everywhere we talk about electroshock, even if electroshock, in this story, obviously never happened. It is not known who spread news that the prosecutor’s office itself was forced to deny. But it goes around the world and remains intact, even after it was discovered in a courtroom that that machine could not do any harm and that its only “defect” was the absence of the CE mark (whose certification , however, can be found on the manufacturer’s website). But that word, electroshock, terrifying and at the same time clearly false, is the first crack in a story which, little by little, becomes more and more nebulous.
Bibbiano, a mother’s complaint: “My ex abused our daughter”
Politics, meanwhile, has already sensed the deal: the involvement of a dem mayor, the first citizen of Bibbiano Andrea Carletti, provides the right and the M5S with the excuse to label the Democratic Party as the party of Bibbiano, the party of thieves of children and electric shock. Political leaders descend on the Emilian town, trying to cannibalize it during the vote. Matteo Salvini goes on stages throughout Italy holding children in his arms who he defines as Bibbiano’s victims, but who have nothing to do with Bibbiano. In the meantime, the pillory for psychotherapists and social services is total. Social workers are chased, threatened, beaten. Reports of mistreatment and abuse plummet, no one asks for help anymore. Nobody feels like giving any. Self-styled parents deprived of their children appear on TV, telling stories that no one verifies. The wiretaps are aired while the investigation is still underway, secret documents that are chopped up and artfully edited to make hell even uglier.
The fear creeps into Italian homes that someone, one day, might snatch their children from their arms for no reason. And the suspects, whose photos end up in all the newspapers carefully selected from those most in line with the image of the monster, become outcasts to the point that not even precautionary measures are needed anymore. The investigating judge even goes so far as to write: «Precisely because of the destruction of the public image of the suspects, so much so that they have to fear for their safety», the danger of evidence pollution «has gradually diminished».
Bibbiano, the “visa” of the ASL psychologists on the cases entrusted to Hansel and Gretel
A confirmation, therefore, of the devastating media contours assumed by the affair. «The contacts (possibly of possible connection by the suspects) with the political and ideological world of reference – writes the investigating judge -, precisely because of the large negative emphasis given by the mass media to the matter, will probably not have concrete negative results for the genuineness of the evidentiary acquisition in a future trial, given that the fear for one’s public image that direct support for the suspects would entail (if discovered) will constitute an adequate “cordon sanitaire” more than any other precautionary measure”. In short, there is no point in worrying: approaching the suspects is equivalent to a social death sentence. Collective indignation, stimulated by dozens and dozens of articles that tell horrifying but manipulated, if not false, details, causes a wave of hatred and fake news.
Starting from the existence of a system – despite the fact that there are only eight cases on trial out of hundreds of foster cases – which it has generated
the false belief in the existence of dozens and dozens of children unjustly torn from their families. But no one has delved into those sometimes gruesome stories, no one has delved into those alleged abuses. Maybe even true, the prosecution claims, but that’s not what matters. What matters are the “inflated” relationships (according to the prosecutor’s office) that would have facilitated those fosters.
Bibbiano, the father of Foti’s patient bought drugs for his daughter: under investigation
The symbol of the story is a drawing, which according to the prosecution was falsified: according to the prosecutor, a psychologist added two arms to the body of a man, portrayed standing next to a little girl. Arms that stretch over the intimate areas, telling a story that in reality, the prosecution claims, does not exist. But sifting through the papers, it is not difficult to discover that the drawing, in reality, is different from how it was presented by (and to) the press: the two figures are not standing, but lying on a bed (of which there is no track in the version that ended up in the newspapers). The two figures are those of a little girl and, above her, an adult. A scenario that even without arms is potentially horrifying.
After the indictment of 17 people, in November 2021, and the abbreviated sentence of Claudio Foti, the psychotherapist considered a symbol of history (despite not having anything to do with foster care), the theses of the prosecutor’s office become absolute truth. And Foti is treated like a dangerous criminal, ending up being kicked out of a restaurant and labeled “the wolf of Bibbiano”. He has nothing to do with the story of the wolf – which is just a puppet used by a psychotherapist during therapy. But it will take time for the pieces of the story to begin to emerge. Like the fact that there was no electric shock or that the cases contested are very few, while the uncomfortable situations are all certified. In June 2023, Foti is acquitted.
According to the prosecution, it would have caused borderline disorder and depression in the only patient involved in the case, but on appeal it was shown that this would not be possible under any circumstances. And he, who delivered the videos of the sessions to demonstrate her good faith, would not have manipulated her memories, nor convinced the girl that it was her father who hurt her. However, the hatred towards her is still alive and those who participated in the delegitimization campaign continue to invoke the pillory. Starting from a false assumption: his involvement in the investigation of the Devils of the Bassa, which ended with the conviction of the defendants accused of pedophilia, but whose official narrative was distorted by “Veleno”. What does Foti have to do with “Veleno”? Nothing, except for the fact that I criticized him. But to admit it would be to deny the existence of a method, the lie on which this whole story is based.
While Foti’s trial has ended, that of the other 17 defendants continues. The ongoing trial in Reggio Emilia has been ongoing for over two years and the prosecution witnesses are still being paraded before the judges. And each hearing resizes the accusatory framework: there are already nine witnesses considered to be under investigation, while the hypothesis of abuse of office crumbles under the blows of the testimonies.
From which, so far, some certainties have emerged: if Foti and his ex-wife Nadia Bolognini arrived in Val d’Enza it is because the Local Health Authority did not have therapists adequately trained to deal with the trauma of abuse. And the children reached those psychotherapists only after the approval of the health authority. There is the mother who reported her ex-husband for abuse before meeting social services, only to change her story during the investigations. There are the – concerned – reports from the school on the children involved and much more. There is even a self-interception, in which the police speak of audio to be “let out”. And the strange question to the texts: «Do you read Doubt? Did someone send it to you?”. An issue that goes hand in hand with the accusation addressed to the defenders of the trial by the prosecutor Gaetano Paci, who intervened in the courtroom in defense of the prosecutor Valentina Salvi, denouncing the «communicating vessel that has evidently been created between the trial and its stage, that is, the press.” All this for defending the rights of the accused. Overwhelmed by a wave of fake news, mud and threats that everyone has already forgotten about.
The process is still long and will most likely lose abuse of office along the way, a crime currently being repealed. But what is certain, at the moment, is that after using Bibbiano as a cudgel, anyone who asked for an account has stopped caring. Tell us about Bibbiano, everyone was screaming in those terrible days. And everyone did it without knowing what they were talking about, helped by hundreds of fake accounts, in the wake of a hashtag that flooded the network with garbage, which remained afloat, despite everything. However, at a certain point, everyone stopped talking about Bibbiano. Yet the trial in Reggio Emilia – where 17 people are accused – continues, reserving surprises and twists. Highlighting what anyone who knows the law has always known: detention orders are not a Bible. The process is in charge. It would be enough to follow him. Only in this way can we talk about Bibbiano.
Source: Il Doubt
